Accepted..Yay...

[vomitsmoothie]

Well, I was accepted to my top choice PhD program in Cognitive Psychology (I only applied to 2 PhD and 2 masters programs because I had low GRE scores and I haven't heard from the other schools yet).  While exciting, I am definitely going through the impostor syndrome mentioned by another poster earlier.

The school is being a bit vague in terms of

Comments

[roseofjuly]

I'm in psychology myself and although I was researching and applying before the economic recession, the research-oriented PhD programs in psychology are programs that you should get funding in. In my opinion you should not take out student loans to pay for tuition or living expenses (beyond perhaps a one-time loan to move to your new place or put down a security deposit or something) for a PhD program. Yes, you should have a career at the end of it, but it's not going to be like investment banking or management consulting or even being a physician. In my area of the country (the Northeast) a new assistant professor can expect to make between $60-70K their first year. And that's assuming that you get a tenure-track position right out of grad school. More likely in our field, you'll work as a post-doctoral fellow for 2-5 years and earn about $30,000-40,000, unless you get one of those higher-paying prestigious fellowships. Taking out substantial loans to finance a PhD can cripple you financially as you're trying to establish yourself.

In my experience most psychology programs I've looked at (I'm in social psychology but my program also has a cognitive area) do offer 5 years of funding. I'm in an interdisciplinary sociomedical psychology program so I have three years of funding, but with very good prospects for being funded my final 2-2.5 years. IMO it's better to have funding at the front end and have to apply at the back end rather than the other way around, because you've had time to build up rapport with professors and others. My two advisors are very aware of my lack of funding for the last 2-2.5 years and they are committed to helping me find some money.

After communicating my excitement and pleasure at being accepted and assuring the program that they were my top choice, I started asking questions about funding. In my experience a direct approach works. Academics are funny when it comes to talking about money - like someone else said, there's this idea that you're supposed to be doing this for the love of it. But you will need to eat. So ask:

-If you have funding
-If you do, how much it is per year?
-How many years is it for?
-How is this going to be distributed (monthly, semi-monthly, lump sums)?
-Are taxes taken out of it? (This is important when April owes around and you owe!!)
-Does it cover summers? (My program does. Some don't.)
-What other perks come with it? (If it's a teaching assistantship, do you get tuition remission? Do you get health insurance? Do you get travel funding to go to conferences? IF so, how much is that?)
-What do you have to do to maintain the money? (Teach? research? Some programs also have 'satisfactory progress' requirements, although at my school that just means B or higher in all your classes and the verbal nod from your advisor).

And then to the other graduate students, you can ask them if the funding is adequate to live in the area. $25,000/year may be awesome in one place and not so much in another.

If you don't have funding yet, you can ask when students usually obtain funding (one semester into the program? Two years?) and how the students usually end up paying for the program until they get funding. If they don't want to tell you, say they don't know, or answer "mostly with loans" I would say that's a red flag.